Addicted to the Matrix

“Hi, my name is Hajira and I’m addicted to the Internet.”

“Hi Hajira!”

Phew, you say to yourself, that cow is finally getting the help she needs. You might be right about the cow part, but the only problem is that the support group is an online one…

It’s a common problem faced by many of us – we spend so much time on the internet that our relationships, activities and work in the real world come off second best at times.

Remember the real world? The place where you could reach out and grab somebody’s hand, feel the blood pulse beneath the skin? The place where you could be reasonably certain that your friend is actually a young lady and not a middle-aged man who breathes heavily and keeps the Kleenex handy whenever you post a new profile picture of yourself?

I think the only thing that keeps us coming back to the real world is food. When we can eat food on the internet, we won’t ever bother to press the disconnect button.

That sign on the door that says “On lunch - back in 15 minutes!” will be staying up much, much longer than that. Even the prospect of real, sweaty, fumbling sex can be passed up these days in favour of, ahem, “researching” one’s more taboo proclivities in a much more glamorous format.

Recently, a Korean couple who starved their baby to death while they looked after a virtual baby at the internet cafe showed the world how far this thing can go. Just give them a bowl of shark fin soup in their virtual world and they wouldn’t have even resurfaced to find out that they had killed their own kid.

So now there are only three categories of people who still exist in the real world. They are as follows:

1. “Celebrities” – these people have to go into the real world to have pictures taken of them passed out in the gutter with their underwear around their ankles. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be famous for anything. They do occasionally pass their time in cyberspace by having Twitterfeuds with other "celebrities".

2. Politicians – often found running amok (impregnating random women, embezzling taxpayers’ money, running over joggers, etc.) in the real world because everyone else is in cyberspace stalking other people they don’t like and playing Farmville.

3. Poor people – these people don’t have computers so we think their opinion doesn’t really matter until we realise it’s election time again. Can often be found burning tyres in service delivery protests, but still can't be expected to think outside the box when putting a tick in the old ballot box.

On the other hand, living completely in the virtual world might mean that we get to eat whatever we want and still stay virtually thin. If they develop a decent mutton biryani then I’m buying myself a plot of land in Farmville. Hyuk.